Thursday, July 29, 2010

It really takes a great deal of arrogance - hubris, even - to assume that one's actions will not have consequences. Or better yet, that those consequences can be tightly controlled. For almost two decades now, the powers meddling in the Balkans (and by this I am referring to the U.S. and its European satellites) have flip-flopped between whichever "principles" suited their policy at the time, with the only constant being that the Serbs would always come out on the losing end.

First they advocated self-determination for the peoples of Yugoslavia - until the Serbs in what are today Bosnia and Croatia asserted that right. Then the principle suddenly changed to sanctity of borders (of Croatia and Bosnia - not Yugoslavia), only to go back to "self-determination" in 1999, so that the ethnic Albanians could claim Serbia's province of Kosovo. Sanctity of borders? Oh, that doesn't apply to Serbia, don't you know?

In effect, Serbia and the Serbs have been put outside the law. There is no punishment for killing Serbs. You want proof of that? Ask Naser Oric, Ramush Haradinaj, Ejup Ganic or Florim Ejupi. Ethnically cleansing Serbs isn't a crime, either. Franjo Tudjman, Alija Izetbegovic and Hashim Thaci became respected statesmen by doing so. Invading and occupying Serbia doesn't seem to be a crime, either - the ICJ ruled in 1999 that Yugoslavia (as the union of Serbia and Montenegro was then called) had no standing to sue NATO, which was at that time conducting a campaign of aggression with the purpose of occupying Kosovo.

But the Empire couldn't stop there. Oh no. It insisted, instead, that this is all a special case - even as it reserved the right to treat anyone, anywhere as it has treated the Serbs. Well of course it was a special case, comments former Imperial official Matthew Parish, more special than even the Empire itself knows:

The enormity of the legal precedent being set by Kosovo’s independence cannot be overlooked. In Kosovo a consortium of foreign powers, acting initially without a United Nations mandate, intervened using force in a sovereign state to resolve that country’s ethnic conflict. They then occupied part of the country and oversaw its secession over a nine-year period. It is not clear that the ICJ should have lent its imprimatur to such an exceptional event. Whatever one’s view of Kosovo’s independence, it must be conceded that the events that led to UNMIK’s occupation and separation of the province from the rest of Serbia were unique.

To have lent these events a cloak of legal support may be to suggest that other disputed territories have a similar 'right' to secede, potentially fuelling ethnic civil wars elsewhere in the world.

It is the very peril I pointed out in December 2009, as the process Serbia initiated before the ICJ began: "It is one thing to flout the law with impunity. It is quite another to call such behavior legal."

What I call the Empire, Parish dubs - perhaps more accurately - a "consortium of foreign powers." But the point remains: they imposed their will, by force, explicitly against the laws of nations, on another country. Where once they maintained their actions were "illegal but legitimate" (in the words of Goldstone's "Independent commission"), now they insist that it was all perfectly legal. Thuggery has become law, thus making the law pointless.

This goes beyond Serbia, or the Albanians, or the territory of Kosovo itself. It is a nuclear bomb detonated amidst the already crumbling world order - by the very people who style themselves its foremost guardians. Now we brace for the inevitable fallout.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Following my initial impressions about the ICJ verdict, I've now put together a more detailed analysis over at Antiwar.com.

Yesterday morning, when news of the verdict came, I was at the RT studio in Washington, DC. What I said in the following clip was literally at a moment's notice, without any prior knowledge of the questions:

They usually identify me as "Columnist, Antiwar.com"; not sure why this time they used the misnomer "journalist".

Update (July 28): Many thanks to Ilana Mercer, who re-posted the video and linked to my column on Barely A Blog.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

After much hemming and hawing, the International Court of Justice finally declared today that the "declaration of independence" by the Albanian provisional government in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo did not violate international law, or UNSCR 1244.

Seriously?

Certainly there is no law against declaring independence. But that doesn't mean "Kosovo" had the right to do so. Under UNSCR 1244, it had to remain a part of Serbia - even if under temporary UN control - pending the outcome of status talks. But there were never any talks - there was just NATO messenger Martti Ahtisaari, declaring that Kosovo ought to become an independent, Albanian state. And Serbia was told to take it or leave it.

Technical details, you'll say. After all, the Albanians are such an overwhelming majority. But you never wonder how they got to be such a majority over the past century. Could it be because they sided with the Austrians, the Nazis, the Communists, and NATO - every time at the expense of the Serbs? Between the murder and expulsion of non-Albanians, and the highest birthrates in Europe (much higher than in the neighboring Albania, and unrelated to the level of education), no wonder the Albanians are a majority today. Yet they claim they have historically been the victims of oppression....

But weren't there Serb atrocities? Genocide, mass ethnic cleansing, tens of thousands killed? In short, no. Lies your friendly NATO spokesman fed you to go along with the program. The KLA was romanticized by the media as this idealistic, young, progressive freedom-fighting movement. KLA hats are New York chic. Surely these people have nothing to do with jihadism, and all the church-burning and throat-slitting and bus-bombing - if you've ever heard of them, to begin with - are just righteous revenge for whatever evils the Serbs must have committed to merit such treatment. But then, what of the Albanian behavior in the 1980s, before any of the alleged Serb atrocities had taken place?

This isn't about democracy. It isn't about liberty. There is no such thing as a "Kosovar" ; it is just a matter of time and convenience before the "independent" Kosovo merges into Greater Albania (or "ethnic Albania," as its advocates claim). Meanwhile, Kosovo still buys most of its power, even most of its bread, from the rest of Serbia. Its "government" is a collection of murderous mobsters; between them, they've killed more Albanians than the Serbs were ever accused of.

Oh sure, the U.S. government, much of the EU and many of their client states elsewhere recognize the "Republic of Kosovo." And I suppose more will jump on the bandwagon now, as the propaganda mill spins the ICJ verdict as "justice". But saying something exists doesn't make it so.

No, dear reader, it really isn't as simple as the mainstream media, the State Department, NATO, and now even the ICJ would have you believe.

I know many of you out there can't be bothered to care about this. What's it to you that some country out there got robbed of a piece of land, along with its dignity? But if fabricating and exaggerating atrocities to attack and occupy a country on behalf of a separatist, terrorist movement, isn't illegal... then what, pray tell, is?

You may not care about it now, because the people being bullied are the Serbs, a people you've been told was OK - nay, necessary even - to hate and despise. But tomorrow, it may happen to you. And then it will be too late.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

A little while ago, several Liberal MPs in the Canadian Parliament proposed a resolution declaring July 11 "Srebrenica Remembrance Day." Fortunately, Prime Minister Harper would have none of it, so the proposal was taken off the table - for now.

The resolution was not a product of altruism and sheer goodness of the Liberals' hearts, but rather an initiative mounted by the Congress of North American Bosniaks, and something called the "Institute for the Research of Genocide" (whose URL identifies them as the "Institute for Genocide").

After Mr. Harper put the kibosh on the resolution, the CNAB and the Institute raised a ruckus. Their initial protest, on June 23, included a long list of people identified as an "international team of experts" and claiming illustrious academic titles. The post with the list, however, has since been taken down from the Institute website.

Here are just some of the names from the list:

M. Cherif Bassiouni (former UN rapporteur on the events in Bosnia, who endorsed the ridiculously inflated casualty figures and the "mass rape" hoax)

Francis A. Boyle (international ambulance-chaser and author of the "genocide" lawsuit by the Izetbegovic government against Serbia, rejected before an actual court)

Florence Hartmann (once spokesperson for Carla Del Ponte at the ICTY)

Marko Attila Hoare (a world-renowned Serbophobe-cum-historian)

Daniel Toljaga (listed as member of the Board of Directors at the Congress of North American Bosniaks, but better known as proprietor of the Srebrenica Genocide Blog)

Dzemaludin Latic and Fatmir Alispahic, champions of militant Islam and Serbophobia considered even in Bosnia to be the lunatic fringe.

Suffice to say that the list was a veritable who's who of professional victims, genocide entrepreneurs, and people who have built their careers on the myth of Bosnia. So, these folks have taken upon themselves to have the Canadian Parliament endorse their version of history by government fiat - i.e. by force, since they can't actually prove it in court. It is as if they don't believe their argument good enough to just persuade people, even though it has enjoyed almost uncontested dominance in the media for the past 15 years!

The much less organized Canadian Serbs have protested this proposal with letters. The response they got was pretty much a set of talking points reminiscent of the content found on the SGB, Hoare's blog, or the CNAB site.

The letter says that the "the genocidal nature of the particular incident at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 has been internationally recognized." It specifically mentions the ICTY and ICJ verdicts, claiming they were "thoughtful results of fair and independent investigation and testimony."

Yet the ICJ verdict specifically said it had not considered the Srebrenica events itself, but simply accepted the ICTY rulings at face value. To call the ICTY's verdicts "thoughtful", their investigations "independent" and the testimonies of serial perjurers "fair" - that's just rich. Let's see: their crown witness, on which the entire case hangs, is a liar. They have conducted sloppy forensic work and later destroyed much of the evidence. They refuse to show the DNA evidence, then claim it proves something that is physically impossible for DNA evidence to prove (i.e. manner of death). And that's just the tip of the iceberg! The ICTY verdicts have more holes in them than a kitchen sieve.

Another argument in the response is that others have done this - the European Parliament, the US House and Senate, and hey, even the (quisling) government of Boris Tadic in Serbia! - so why not the Canadian legislature? Well, since when did "everyone is doing it" become a valid argument? Just because some lawmakers in Europe and the US have voted with their hearts for a well-prepared piece of propaganda does not have the magical power to transform that propaganda into fact. Truth is not a matter of majority vote - or even consensus.

From the first days of the Bosnian War, the Izetbegovic regime's weapon of choice was propaganda. They aimed to win the war by getting outside forces to do the fighting for them, based on heart-rending stories of massacres, mass rape, concentration camps and genocide. One after another, those stories have been exposed as fabrications and deliberate distortions of the already horrifying reality, while the full horrors of the war were never reported, so as not to interfere with the mythical narrative. The Srebrenica "genocide" is the last lie that remains, the one myth that was built up and reinforced more than any of the others. By now, Srebrenica has become a post facto justification for everything: the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, the foreign mujahedin, the rise of Wahhabism and terrorism, the re-Islamization of Bosnia's Muslims (a goal Izetbegovic set for himself in the 1970s, mind you), the ongoing refusal of Muslim politicians to abide by the country's Constitution, and the equally ongoing attempts to fulfill their wartime objectives politically, by overturning the Dayton Accords.

All of this rests on the foundation of a myth that what happened in July 1995 in Srebrenica was "genocide". Even though the women and children were safely evacuated. Even though the column that refused to surrender and set off across the mountains and minefields to Tuzla was a military formation. Even though the actual number of people who died on that march was never established (the "8,000" figure is equally arbitrary as the "300,000" we'd heard for a decade, before facts became impossible to ignore), and the actual evidence suggests that the number of people actually murdered (as in executed, which indeed is a war crime) is several hundred. Even though nothing was ever produced to demonstrate intent on part of the Bosnian Serbs to actually exterminate the Muslims as a people - apart from the very strong belief by the Muslims that this was the case.

Yet in a proper court of law, it doesn't matter what one believes - only what one can prove. Fully aware that the ICTY judgments are based on belief and conjecture rather than actual facts, the believers in the Srebrenica Genocide Myth are now trying to impose it by force, by getting governments to pass resolutions. Next up will probably be demands that anyone questioning their myth be prosecuted as a "holocaust denier." So, not only are they disparaging the actual Holocaust by declaring Srebrenica a "genocide," they are also exploiting and abusing the mechanisms established so no one could strive to rehabilitate the Nazis and deny the suffering of the Jews. When you consider the fact that the ancestors of many of those Muslims actually helped the Nazis in their ghastly "Endloesung", it becomes obvious that Srebrenica is not just about the present and the future, but also about whitewashing the past.

I understand why it is in the interest of the Bosnian Muslims' religious, political and propaganda leadership (and their associates, fellow-travelers and useful idiots in the West and elsewhere) to promote the Srebrenica Genocide Myth. How that would serve Canada's interests, however, is beyond me. Stephen Harper appears to have reached a similar conclusion - and for that he deserves thanks, not just of the Serbs living in Canada, but all Canadians who care about their own country.